When learning .NET I find it useful to have a couple different methods of learning.  Here are some of the learning resources that I use.

First, I find that if I want to learn a topic thoroughly I turn to books or SDK documentation.  I find that books give a more straightforward approach to many topics than just trying to find article to read on the web.  Next I go to training classes, which could include anything from webcasts to in person training such as Dunn Training or Developmentor.  These classes can help get you up to speed on a topic in fractions of the time it would take you to learn them on your own or to ask your friend in the cubical next to yours.  Then to stay up to date or to learn new topics I attend user groups or free events.  These are such thing as the C# User Group or MSDN Events.  These are a great way to talk with other developers and to learn about a topic that you find interesting.

Here is my list of how I would rank these training materials based on Content per dollar:
1) Books – Best return on the amount of money they cost and if you have time to read it you will probably know more about the topic than listening to someone tell you about it.
2) Training classes – Even though it costs a little more than a book, these are well worth the cost and are life savers if you have to learn something very quickly.  These are also great if you are not directly paying for them because the content per dollor goes up considerably.  Also you have the opportunity to ask the instructors questions on topics you don’t understand, which will make learning much faster and more in depth.
3) User Groups – Well I bet most of you thought I would put this as the number 1 bang for the buck deal, but in most cases I feel that the books and training are more in depth on topics.  I think that user groups are great if you want training that is low cost and you have time to go to them.  Don’t get me wrong even at number 3 it is still a very important part of being a developer.

Based on cost:
1) User Groups – These are the best way to learn current and new topics without having to spend any money and they are usually after hours, which make them easy to get to.  Also you might win prizes that make them an even better deal.
2) Books – If you are willing to put in the effort to read the book you will have a great return on the money.  What I have found is that most people actually don’t read the entire book they skim through chapters they don’t find interesting.  I feel those people are missing out a little bit because it always happens that I find something I didn’t know about in those chapters I wasn’t interested in reading about.
3) Training classes – Aside from Microsoft Webcasts which could be consider under user groups, training classes usually cost more money and are held for a limited amount of time.  If you don’t think of your questions during the event, people tend to usually shy away from emailing the instructor to ask how to accomplish something.

Overall summary:
1) Books – 1.5 Ranking
2) User Groups – 2 Ranking
3) Training – 2.5 Ranking

Like I said in the beginning, I use all of these resources.  Just because I list them on how I use them doesn’t mean that is how you have to use them.  Actually, let me know what you think, tell me how you would rank these learning resources or if you have others that I didn’t talk about.

--Brendon Schwartz

Check out the Guide to buying Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. We need to recommend that Microsoft put a calculator on the webpage just like buying a house.

Now it gets better.  Here is the way I see it.  If you already have an MSDN subscription then you are ok, but if don’t now is your chance to spend $2,000 dollars to become ok.  You must act quickly though to give Microsoft your $2,000 dollars now this way your subscription will run out sooner, but you will be able to have VS2005 at a discounted cost of $2,000 dollars a year.

So now if you are an MSDN Universal subscriber you must pick what type of developer you are: Developer, Architect, or Tester.  With this model, MSDN subscriptions now fall in line with the Visual Studio product.  So my question is why are we still calling it an MSDN subscription, isn’t it just a Visual Studio subscription? 

Do you own a Standard edition of VS2003?  There do not appear to be any upgrade options for you today from what I can find.  You will most likely need to either get or purchase a copy of the express edition or move up to the professional edition of VS2005.

So how much does all of this really cost?  Well I don’t think they are going to say, but here is what I can tell from Microsoft’s web pages.  These are my guesses and might not be accurate when the final release comes out.

VS2005 purchased by itself:
Visual Studio 2005 Professional has an estimated retail price of $799.
Visual Studio 2005 Team Editions for Software Developers, Architects, or Testers has an estimated retail price of $5,469/year each
Team Foundation Client Access License has an estimated retail price of $499

MSDN purchased by itself (these are all 1 year subscriptions):
MSDN Universal – upgrade $2,299 full version Estimated Price $2,799
MSDN Enterprise – upgrade $1,599 full version Estimated Price $2,199
MSDN Professional – upgrade $899 full version Estimated Price $1,199

After the release of VS2005 MSDN pricing: Unknown at this point.

So if you want to know how much it costs for VS2005, I guess it depends on how many years you are going to use it for.

Don’t get me wrong I think the tools are great that Microsoft is coming out with.  I just think it is tough to figure out how much money you are going to pay anymore to create Windows applications.  I think that the unknown might start turning more people off from developing Windows based applications unless they do it as a job.  Tell me what you think and if the prices are too high or just right.

One last note not to forget you also have these costs.  Your guess is as good as mine on the cost.

"The Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server is sold separately on a Server/CAL basis. Each of the Visual Studio 2005 Team Editions for Software Developers, Architects, and Testers includes a CAL for the Team Foundation Server. To learn more about Team Foundation Server, click here."

--Brendon Schwartz

I’m out to dinner with 2 coworkers and several of the client’s IT staff.  We’re talking about all kinds of stuff that people talk about after work (OK, mostly complaining about the coworkers who aren’t present) when we get to the subject of travelling for work.  I won’t bore you with the details of the conversation except for the part where my potential travel to foreign ports of call were discussed.  Specifically Paris and Hong Kong.  I would love to travel to those places like you wouldn’t believe.  Even if some of the time there was for work, I’d love to go. I’ve been overseas to London as a teenager, but as an adult I’ve never been further out of country than the Caribbean.

Let’s go into story swapping mode.  Tell me about the coolest place you’ve ever visited (and let’s stick to the places you go for work related purposes – I don’t want to hear about how your vacations are better than mine).

I’ve been to several decent American cities for work, including Nashville (Gibson cafe = cool) but the best place I went to was Chicago.  I was consulting for Amoco Oil and got to go to all kinds of great restaurants and whatnot while I was there.  I even got to sit near Jerry Springer at dinner once (while he was there with some girl who absolutely had to be a stripper).  The work was decent, the pizza was good, the beer was better, and I got to be friends with a guy born on leap year.  Every leap year I get an e-mail about the other (famous) people born on leap year from my 36 year old friend celebrating his 9th birthday.  I had fun in Nashville (the work environment sucked but the fun I had after work was great – I saw a bunch of bands and hung out talking to the lead singer of once of them (hot chick) for a while) but I have to rate my time in Chicago as tops while at that job.  I’ve also spent a lot of time down in Orlando working for a client who could get me into Disney World for free.  While the people were nice and Disney World is Disney World, I think I spent so much time down there that it kind of lost the magic.  But of all the places I’ve travelled, I’ve never gotten to/had to travel internationally for work.

So let’s share some stories.  Here’s mine.  While in Chicago I met a guy who worked for Amoco.  He was part of the lab team responsible for wiring the network cables and whatnot.  I don’t know if you guys are aware of this, but that job can be filled with union people in large companies.  This is the case at Amoco – I would get in trouble if I plugged a machine into the hub right next to it if I didn’t call a union guy to do it for me.  Anyway, this guy was part of the union.  Great guy personally, I don’t know how he kept his job.  He shared a story about how he went on vacation one time for two or three weeks without telling the company that he was going.  He paid for the entire $15,000 trip with the company card.  This was three years before I met him.  He STILL had his job!!!!  Amazing!

— Matt Ranlett

Note – this post was written at 12:30 am after 3 beers and 4 glasses of whiskey.  Aaaah, there’s no travel like business on the road!

In case you didn’t know last night at the C# user group there was an announcement that Brad Abrams and the CLR Team would be in town in May and will be the speakers of the May C# user group meeting.  You can bet the size of the group will be a little larger than usual.  Tell all of your friends that program to come out and meet some of the Microsoft team that works on the actual .NET runtime you are building your applications for.

--Brendon Schwartz

So I’m now down here at the client site, and I’ve just recently been introduced to a new contractor down here.  Keep in mind that I’m out of state.  The new contractor knows me from the Atlanta User Groups – he remembers me from when I was “instructing” the VB user group back in November.  Apparently the topic was a Windows Mobility topic.

I thought that was a fascinating event – running into someone I know so far from home.  I mean, the last time I was ‘introduced’ to someone I already knew, I was just hanging out in Barnes & Noble in Alpharetta.  Now I can’t even escape you guys when I leave the state!   Seriously though, it’s nice to see a friendly face, and it’s nice to see that people keep their skills sharp via the user groups and that translates into real job opportunities.

— Matt Ranlett

Howdy folks!  I’m back from my blogging vacation (I hope).  The past few weeks haven’t really been a lot of fun for me – first I was sick with both the flu and strep throat at the same time.  Follow that up with a week or two of intense “get it done” pressure at work so we can make a major delivery to our largest client including a weekend where I put in 30 hours this past Saturday and Sunday alone (16 hours on Saturday, 14 on Sunday).  Of course, since we managed to get our delivery out the door in time, but with some potential instability (after so much last minute work, confidences weren’t as high as we’d hoped they’d be).  So that meant someone has to travel with the delivery down to the client site so we could hold their hand.  Included in the “someone” is yours truly!  I’m writing this entry in the airport lobby, watching my plane pull up to the terminal listening to the Garden State soundtrack on my Creative MuVo MP3 player.  Of course, last minute air travel for work wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t bump up against some personal travel, so I’m flying back into the Atlanta airport exactly 8 hours before I’m supposed to fly back out again.  This time I’m headed out for a quick jaunt to Las Vegas.

All of this work and illness has left me feeling a little bit out of touch.  I’m missing or have missed 5 user group meetings.  Brendon has been doing an excellent job of covering for me, and I appreciate it.  It’s good to be part of a team that works.

OK – plane is boarding soon.  I’m putting the laptop away for the evening.  I’m looking forward to some well earned sleep.

— Matt Ranlett

The group seemed to grow to a standard “over 25” group; this is the second or third week in a row that all the regular seats were full.  I have to say that says that Paul and Keith are doing a great job.  This group is a great group for people to talk with each other at the beginning and at the break; I guess they have something in common, like computers.  There were a bunch of new faces in the crowd and it was great to meet some of the local Atlanta Bloggers that showed up for the meeting.  Keith and Paul gave the standard introduction and there were a few job announcements.  Keith then jumped into his talk about Threading.  I call it that because he mostly talked about classes in the System.Threading namespace.  From what I heard from people in the audience the section on Locks was one of the best they had ever seen before!  Wow what a compliment (Great job Keith and keep it up).  After that we had a session of make the Microsoft man talk as much as you can and complain about the new products as much as you can.  We asked questions about the next Visual Studio coming out and about how pricing might be structured.  The funny part was we really didn’t have any concrete answer aside from the fact that he said they can’t give away a product that has taken a while to make.  After we had finished announcements for Code Camps and asking the Microsoft Man questions we moved on to Mitch’s presentation on C# 2.0.  Unfortunately we had spent so much time on breaks and other taking that he was not able to give his full presentation.  He was able to cover generics and anonymous method calls both of which he did a wonderful job on.  Hopefully he will be able to finish up the presentation at one of the other user groups.  Make sure if you attend a user group that you go around and at least say hello to other people in the room, they may be interested in talking with you if you are interested in .NET. 

-- Brendon Schwartz

Check out the picture from last nights C# user group

http://www.cyanbane.com/2005/04/atlantas-c-user-group-20050404.asp

--Brendon Schwartz

Q: Is Matt on vacation?
A: No

Q: Is Matt ok or was he in a terrible accident or something?
A: Yes Matt is ok and No he was not in any kind of accident.

Q: Does Matt not like me anymore?
A: Matt still likes you and still enjoys hanging out with you especially at user groups.

Q: Are the user groups just too much for Matt?
A: No, going to 8 to 10 user groups a month is not too much for Matt he loves hanging out with his friends.

Q: Will Matt ever do a good review of the user groups again instead of Brendon’s?
A: We can all only hope!

Q: Does Matt still have access to a computer or did he move to country where they don’t have power?
A: Matt still does own a computer and has running water and electricity; he should be blogging again soon and near a computer any time now.

Q: Will we ever see Matt again?
A: Yes so here is the deal

Matt was sick a couple of weeks ago, in fact he was not able to show up to 1 or two groups because he was sick which is a good thing for the rest of us. (Thanks for think about the group Matt and not getting us sick).  Then Matt had a lot of work he had to do for his actual job since he doesn’t get paid to go to user groups.  And finally Matt had to go out of town and will be on vacation later next week to relax a little.  He should be back on the scene after next week and back in action soon.  See you at the user groups soon Matt.

--Brendon Schwartz

I wanted to get other peps feed back on what book they would recommend if their friend asked them to recommend an excellent C# book. 

Give me your two cents on what a good book would be. 

--Brendon Schwartz

I would like to try to get a session together where developers or architects in the community could come together and come up with some best practices and hands on approaches for designing systems.  Here is my idea below.

Meetings would occur on a Saturday from 11:30 until 3:30.  The cost of the event would be $5 dollars, unless I can find someone to sponsor the event.  The $5 dollars would cover lunch from somewhere like the Atlanta bread company.  The environment would be a round table atmosphere with a white board to write on.  I would like every to give their input and suggestions so we can come up with the best solutions.  And finally we would have one or more people at the event that would take notes on what is talked about and we could put this information into a document for the users of the group.

A topic idea for the first meeting could be something like: “How to create an ASP.NET Enterprise website from the ground up”

We could also follow along with the Patterns and Practices or the Guidelines from Microsoft. .

Let me know if anyone is interested.  I was thinking about a group of 12 would be the right size, but I wanted to see if anyone else was interested in this.

-- Brendon Schwartz

Over seventy people showed up for the third .Net User Group meeting of the year, the third in the new Microsoft Offices.  There were snacks and drinks for all who attended and we got started after a few short announcements.

Doug Ware, user group leader extraordinaire, was the sole presenter of the evening as circumstances beyond anyone’s control prevented the main speaker for the evening from coming to discuss cryptography.  But Doug was prepared with a free-ranging discussion of using Visual Studio’s Setup projects to create application installers.  Beginning with a quick thirty minute overview and ending with questions from the group on conditional installation behaviors and Windows Management Instrumentation scripting with VBScript and Javascript, Doug managed to fill the entire evening with MSI installer education.  Doug has lots of experience dealing with setup applications and he shared some of his hard earned wisdom.  For example, Doug recommends that you don’t use a bootstrap setup (creates an .exe AND a .msi installer) as you are highly unlikely to find a machine WITH the .Net framework (required by any Visual Studio setup application) but WITHOUT the Windows Installer.  Doug recommends you look into Orca, the MSI editor, so that you can change some behaviors of the MSI that Visual Studio doesn’t expose to you.  Another of Doug’s tips is to pay close attention to the Launch Conditions dialog (because this badly named dialog actually includes 2 dialogs which can be used to help control conditional installer behavior).  One final note – to get at some of the global variables defined within an MSI through script, check the Session.Property(“CustomActionData”) value.  For example, to get the target install directory, you’d check Session.Property(“TARGETDIR”).

Since the main speaker for the evening was unable to show up, everyone went home after Doug finished his presentation and handed out a few prizes.

— Matt Ranlett

Traffic was bad so we had a slow start to the night, but since we had 3 presentations on reporting we had to get started at 6:30.  Jim started the night telling everyone what we had in store which was Active Reports by Jim, Steve with PDFLib and XSL-FO and finally me with Reporting Services. 

Jim started out with Active Reports which gives the end user the ability to create the reports in addition to the developers.  The end users can create the report, but you will need to create the datasource in the back end ahead of time.  You can pass in classes or objects instead of a datasource for people that use things like CLSA.  Once you install active reports all you to do is add a new file from the Add New Item selection and then if you are familiar with access you are good to go.  If you know Microsoft Access, Crystal Reports, or Reporting Services you should be very familiar with Active Reports.  To add it to a winform all you have to do is create a winform and add the report to it.  Active Reports by Data Dynamics. Standard Edition is about 499 and the pro version is 1299 per developer.  All of development for Active Reports is integrated into Visual Studio 2003 so you don’t have to add anything new.  The system comes with an end user designer with the professional version and gives the users the ability to create a report without have to install Visual Studio, but gives the same look and feel.  Some things it doesn’t do well in version 1.0 is charting, they don’t give you the source, support is great, very quick and prompt,  you don’t have drill down functionality.  The features that Jim really pointed out was the fact that you can program against the entire coding model.

Although traffic was bad we still had a big crowd eventually show up.  Note to self: A good thing to do would be to do a performance test against the reporting engines that most people use today.  We had an announcement for Book247 at a discount again.  If you show up to a group you may have a chance to get this discounted cost. 

Next up was Steve with PDFlib.  This presentation was all about creating PDF files.  The version he uses is a COM component, but there is a newer .NET version.  He pointed out that there are 3 ways to create a PDF file from a website 1) through an application like RS 2) component 3rd party product 3) XSLFO.  He went on to show us the 3rd party version called PDFLib which costs 450 bucks.  This version writes a file to disk with the information that you give it.  We were able to see some of the object model for PDFLib, but when it comes down to it there are many options out there and it just comes down to price and features.  He pointed out that these libraries do have a great place for on the fly changes and these libraries let you change options based on user input.  Finally we got to see a small look at XSL-FO which is taking data and changing them to a formatting object.  There aren’t many processors out there yet because this is still a new standard.  The one that we were shown was an apache version that we had to run from the command line.

Finally I went on to show how you can use Reporting Services in your projects and how you can use the web service to embed the information into a webpage or winform.  This is a good idea if you don’t want the end user to know the URL address or you want to have the report look like it is part of your webpage.

--Brendon Schwartz

P.S.  I promise Matt will be back soon to do the review =)

We had a great turn out for the Mobility group, but had a rocky start.  It was a cold winter day, ok so it wasn’t winter and it wasn’t really cold, but Matt and Michael were not able to make it.  They both had circumstances beyond their control, so I went ahead and ran the show. 

We had a great time learning about Mobility development for Pocket PC and had some great hands on demos.  The first presentation was a great introduction to the problems of the current CF.NET Framework and some of the “missing” features.  Venkat showed us how to add context menus for Cut and Paste to TextBoxes.  He showed how OpenNETCF has implemented a lot of the “missing” features for Compact Framework.  After a quick demo and showing the code required to make this work, we had our second presenter Kirk Evans come up.  He claimed he was going to show the new “missing” features that CF.NET 2.0 will be adding and the enhancements that will make it worth checking out.  If you are a mobility programmer and want to know what is coming in the next version you should have been at this meeting, I think they will post the slides on the Mobility site.  Kirk went over what is coming in Visual Studio 2005 and showed some of new IDE features like being able to skin your app for the device you are using (cool).  Even though Kirk was not feeling well he managed to give a great presentation that he claims he could do in his sleep.  My guess is that he is that smart and probably could. 

Once all the questions had finished we gave away some great prizes that Kirk had brought for us.  Also we had someone announce a position for a Mobility programmer and if you are interested send the Mobility leaders an email and they will put you in contact with him.

--Brendon Schwartz

update ******

Great post about the first presentation and source code

http://vpolisetti.blogspirit.com/archive/2005/03/24/enable_contextmenus_automatically_for_opennetcf_textboxex_co.html